Well I feel left out. Ive never written a book or worked with Alan Ball or big HALLAYWOOOOD directors. No one even asked me to be in EXPELLED. So I cant shill for any of that stuff. And Ive never worked for a big company. And there are few virology-based pop-culture items I can shill for (are there any? do condomscount?). So Im just going to shill for random products/companies/programs I like, for basically no reason. I mean, sure Im not a researcher for Pepsico or anything like that, so I cant write about any science here, but opinions being devoid of science has never stopped anyone from expressing those opinions here at SciBlogs before. Why start now?

QUAKER OATS
Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. Its normally my biggest meal of the day, and I regularly end up having breakfast foods for dinner. Eggs (a million different ways), bacon, sausage, french toast, waffles, pancakes, biscuits and gravy, omelets, muffins (BREAKFAST CAEK!!!), cream of wheat, and, oatmeal.

I love oatmeal.

I love Quaker oats.

Im not a *huge* fan of their flavored microwave oatmeal (though I always keep it on hand on mornings Im really in a rush), but I make this SUPER NOMMY granola using Quaker Old-Fashioned Oats. The one morning food I dont totally like is cereal. I mean, it tastes fine, and its enriched with vitamins and minerals and stuff, but I am inevitably hungry an hour after I have ‘just cereal’ for breakfast. But not when I make Alton Browns granola (bonus shilling for the Food Network!)!

I actually go to a foo-foo grocery store to get lots of different raw nuts and seeds, and unsweetened dried coconut to cut down on the sugar/salt content, and increase the nutrients (pumpkin seeds are loaded with iron). And then with some fresh fruit cut up on top, this stuff is friggen awesome. Dont leave out the coconut, though. The way it crisps up in the oven, LOVE IT (bonus shilling for the coconut industry!)

This granola is also great for my dad, who is on a low sodium diet. He is normally a big-time snacker (crackers, nuts, pretzels, etc), but hes had to cut out a lot of his favorites due to his restricted diet. But this granola is super crunchy and satisfies his snacky-needs, without a lot of sodium (I leave it out, even in batches just for me), AND it helps his cholesterol.

We have scibloggers who go months without posting anything because the whole Red Dwarf series goes view-instantly on netflix and you are spastic over “hours and hours”.

Keep it up though.

I want Erv to get the $$$$$ and when Couch Potato Z gets her conference call I want her to leave the Scienceblogs Seed media industrial paternalistic military rape machine in a blaze of turbo charged cabbage soup crazy.

I’m “holding my breath, hoping that death will brighten, an otherwise dull, afternoon.”

History Punk wrote: “Have you seen the rate of new posts at some of the blogs on this site? Dumb ass.”

Like I said above, the semi-dormant blogs aren’t *new* blogs. Usually someone who accepts a spot at Sb manages to work up some excitement, and posts something substantive when they get here. They might eventually go dormant, but they don’t start that way. Because why bother?

As a consumer of Science Blogs I’m finding the assumptions many are making about their readers to prop up the arguments against PepsiCo pretty damn insulting; enough so that several are being dropped from my personal reading and link list.

Like I said above, the semi-dormant blogs aren’t *new* blogs. Usually someone who accepts a spot at Sb manages to work up some excitement, and posts something substantive when they get here. They might eventually go dormant, but they don’t start that way. Because why bother?

Unless of course, they’re hounded by over-educated for their IQ fuckwits like yourself. Hard to muster enthusiasm when barely literate clowns like you bitch at them and demand their removal. Clearly, any with a firing synapse is not going to invest time and energy creating or posting content that might simply be deleted.

PZ’s first day on sb: 11 posts
Orac: 1
Laden: 1 (actually, it looks like he only posted once that entire month)
Questionable Authority: as per laden
Erv: 3

so, setting aside PZ as being rather atypical, (the man is a machine), we see that Pepsico was actually, from our limited sample, far closer to normal than you seem to think.
(cue handwaving about how they have to operate on a completely different set of standards that evidently include:

1) must have at least 10 deep science posts within the first five minutes of the blog’s existence

2) none of those posts may be even slightly favorable to Pepsico or its products. (note this is a permanent restriction)

3) must never ever mod a comment, even if it’s one that PZ would delete.

I first discovered Sb via Pharyngula. I poked around a little and discovered that to be on Sb one had to have already achieved some sort of reputation as a “good” blogger – someone readable, on top of their game in whatever their field was, someone who had demonstrated that they could consistently blog accurate, useful information in a readable format. While some blogs here capture my interest more than others, and some blogging styles appeal to me more than others, I always knew that somewhere out there there were more blogs by the same person if I was curious, and that they had been vetted, so to speak. I could legitimately judge the newbies based on their prior blogs.

Then along comes PepsiCo and simply by paying enough money they got a blog on a site with a reputation for good blog content. Without demonstrating that they were worth it. A blog that THEY SAID would be an extension of their existing blog. Which would not, IMO, have met the standards of Sb.

Yeah, I think that WOULD end up hurting the reputations of the other bloggers in the long run. Who else would be able to buy a blog?

It’s kinda like HuffPo. They allow so much crap on their site that I simply don’t bother with it – I don’t feel like I can trust most of it, so I don’t waste my time trying to find the sapphire in the swill. Is there good, truthful, factual reporting on HuffPo? Probably. Hell, even FauxNews isn’t wrong 100% of the time, but that doesn’t mean they have a good reputation.

I saw other bloggers as responding to the threat to their blogging reputations in the same way. Surely they could judge THIS blog by reading the blog this one was to be an extension of?

And this is, IMO, completely different from a blogger saying something positive about their employer or plugging their own book. In spite of the insistence above that ‘corporations do not write blogs, people write blogs’, that’s naive. A corporate blog will represent the corporate view and only give corporate-approved information. Criticism of the corporation wouldn’t happen – that’s just reality. Mark CC on the other hand wasn’t always positive about Google products. PZ Myers has criticized his university. Others have made similar criticisms, because they were speaking for themselves, as individuals. A corporate blog doesn’t do that.

Corporate blogs have their place. I read several corporate blogs. But I don’t think Sb is the right place for them.

If Jon H is british, then ‘twat’ and ‘cunt’ are more generic. Some friends of mine who are various forms of british use both those words the way we’d use ‘fuck’. Not every word has the same meaning every where.

If he called you a dick, would you call him out for immediately going with one that pertains to a male body part?

I love the way the post count is thrown out as some sort of representative evidence of anything. Some of you guys would make highly entertaining social scientists; a group of grad students would eat you alive in a conference if you trucked that out as meaningful in any way.

Okay, I have to admit, I find this “adolescent shit storm” highly amusing, mostly because it shows exactly where everyone’s embedded biases and conflicts of interest come blazing out into the public sphere. Sure makes serious scientists look like a bunch of grown-ups.

Quick tip to the die-hard intellectual individualists: nobody gives a shit if you’re so clever that you can reasonably digest corporate b.s. as such. That’s not the point. The point is, not everyone can.

Yes, ERV, not everyone can. Compared to the average blogger on SB, most people aren’t very smart. Compared to the average *commentator* on SB, most people aren’t very smart. And while smarts is not a prerequisite for wisdom, there’s definitely a very high correlation between the two.

People are *riddled* with confirmation bias, and very, very few members of the greater community of human beings are actually equipped with the intellectual constructs to even *recognize* that this is the case. Maybe the top one-half of one-percent of the general public (scientists included) has even the basic understanding of syllogistic logic. Contradictory frameworks are accepted as routine methods of processing information by almost everybody. It’s why our political discourse is so bankrupt, just for one example.

Even people who are very smart in one area (such as the average SB blogger) don’t necessarily exercise this sort of self-analysis in problem spheres other than their domain of expertise.

It’s certainly within the rights of those who write here to get pissed that someone hawked out a spot to a corporation. This is remarkably similar to the ongoing (and vocal) debate about the proper role of for-profit subsidy of science research in the academic community.

SB has set itself up as a portal for *science* blogging. It’s trading off the reputation of the scientists who blog here to acquire prestige. From this prestige, it gains the leverage to acquire more prestigious scientists, and it gains its own voice of authority. In this way, it’s remarkably like any brick-and-mortar institution of higher education in the U.S.

Now, you can pooh-pooh that voice of authority as meaningless or that it ought to be regarded as meaningless, but the fact that this is meaningless *to you* means precisely nothing, and your estimation of how it ought to be regarded by anyone (or everyone) else is about as silly as it ignores the reality of how it is and can be regarded. You’re an anecdote of one. If you don’t understand exactly how this represents a potential problem and why some people are concerned about it, you have a woefully limited understanding of psychology and sociology.

You blogging ‘with’ Pepsi is like you being a smoker or heavy drinker– it makes you look like a hypocrite as an MD.

But I say that not only does Pepsico make healthy products (like Quaker Oats) but they did not do anything wrong scientifically (not that they couldnt have in the future).

Pepsi has done plenty wrong. Like the time that they used contaminated ground water to make pepsi in India and denied it after being caught. They let people drink pesiticides at much higher rates than are allowed in developed countries. When they stoop so low is it really hard to believe that they would buy a science blog in order to leech of the credibility of people here?

Corporate tyranny and the problems associated with it has nothing to do with how unhealthy pepsi’s products may or may not be.

It’s always been my impression that Sb bloggers are scientists who blog science before coming to Sb, such that (however poorly-defined the selection mechanism is), there’s pretty good reason to expect them to be fairly competent scientifically and blogistically, and not be too much of a shill who’s getting paid to say particular things, rather than paid to write what’s interesting to science-minded folks.

No such scheme is perfect, of course. Academic scientists can be very biased, and grind their own careerist axes. They can also grind the axes of the corporate sponsors of their research. That can be bad.

I assumed that’s one reason why Sb bloggers are supposed to be chosen from science bloggers with an interesting blog—interesting in the sense that some reasonable, scientifically knowledgeable people or other selected it, rather than dismissing it as dishonest or just kooky.

Part of that selection process, I assumed, was that at least some Sb bloggers with appropriate expertise would be consulted when deciding whether to offer somebody a spot at Sb—at least in cases that somebody reasonable decided might be controversial.

If what I’ve read is accurate, nothing like that happened with the Pepsi blog. Pepsi bought a spot, without having a blogger with a track record to fill it, and without other Sb bloggers being consulted as to whether they thought the person would be suitably knowledgeable, independent-minded, and generally good at science blogging.

That bites.

Worse, there is a clear conflict of interest here. Its a corporate blog, for chrissakes. Sure, bloggers who are not paid outright by a particular corporation can have conflicts of interest, too, but bloggers paid by a corporation to blog for them clearly do.

Having paid corporate science bloggers creates an appearance of impropriety, like having a judge in a case own a lot of stock in the defendant company. The judge might or might not let her vested interest sway her judgment, but you don’t wait for her to demonstrate that—in general that’s too hard anyway, because it can be subtle—you just insist that the judge recuse herself and let somebody else judge the case.

You’ve got to draw a line somewhere, at least in clear cases, and this seems like one of them. Bloggers paid by Pepsi to blog about nutrition do not belong on science blogs with Orac and PalMD.

I am certainly not accusing any Pepsi scientists of doing anything wrong, or planning to do anything wrong, or of being very likely to do anything wrong, even accidentally.

I’m saying that its reasonable to think that a vested interest like that might make a difference in what and how they blog, and I don’t want to take the risk; it’s likely enough that money will talk.

I’m not a biological or medical researcher, and am not competent to read the blog and judge for myself whether it’s even approximately impartial. If I want to know about HFCS, for example, I want to be able to search science blogs and have a decent expectation that the bloggers that pop up don’t have a big vested interest in slanting the story. I want people like PalMD and Orac, not a corporate shill, even a good, well-meaning, and independent-minded corporate shill who in fact writes the truth I need to know.

The selection of Sb bloggers is not a free speech arena, and corporate bloggers aren’t innocent until proven guilty. We don’t have to let the Pepsi bloggers blog and wait until they screw up, we catch them, and so on. They can blog elsewhere if they really want to blog.

Readers like me want Sb to have at least minimal standards of vetting, including drawing some simple, clear lines like having no corporation-paid bloggers, period. There should be a presumption of guilt, or rather of sufficient suspicion that it interferes with Sb’s mission, both in terms of real concerns about biases and in terms of appearances—whether people like us will see Sb as the place to search for information that’s pretty likely to not be too biased.

Other conflicts of interest do happen, but those are harder to make simple rules about, and we probably have to rely on other means of assessing reputation—e.g., whether reputable commenters and other science bloggers call the blogger in question out for apparent or suspected bias.

BTW, ERV, if you want to hear from particular corporate scientists about particular things, how about inviting them to guest blog on your blog, or suggesting that another Sb blogger with appropriate expertise invite them? If you did that, I’d be more confident in who was selected to blog, and how the information they blogged was okayed. You would be putting your reputation on the line, a bit, and I’d trust you more than I would trust an unfiltered corporate blog.

That is, I’d just say no to a Pfizer blog, but I’d be likely to listen to you if you said to listen to a particular scientist from Pfizer about a particular subject—especially since I’d guess that you were the one moderating comments, not them, and that reasonable and responsible suspicions of bias wouldn’t get swept under the rug.

(I don’t want a drug-company virologist dogpiled by antivax nuts, but I don’t want her to have the power to suppress good questions, either.)

BTW, if you think that current Sb bloggers are just as likely as corporate bloggers to be biased by vested monetary interests, do please name some outstanding examples. Inquiring minds want to know.

I did of course know that Sb bloggers got paid for delivering eyeballs.

And as a sometime corporate board member myself—when I’m feeling especially civic-minded, even—I should have been more precise about “corporations,” etc.

Of course I mean the kind of corporation whose product is something like drugs or food or widgets, rather than, say, a 501c(3) educational group, or a commercial media organization with a reasonable separation between news/opinion and advertising.

Of course I mean the kind of corporation whose product is something like drugs or food or widgets, rather than, say, a 501c(3) educational group, or a commercial media organization with a reasonable separation between news/opinion and advertising.

I don’t think that distinction explains it entirely. For example, if there had been an advertising deal with 454 Life Sciences with some of their scientists brought in to blog about next gen sequencing, do you think there would have been as much backlash from other Sciencebloggers? Or if the Templeton Foundation sponsored a blog here, would that have been OK since it’s a nonprofit? It’s understandable that many bloggers felt embarrassed and betrayed about the Pepsi decision, but there seems to be some rationalization going on when they attribute this entirely/mostly to Pepsi being a corporation.

Of course I mean the kind of corporation whose product is something like drugs or food or widgets, rather than, say, a 501c(3) educational group, or a commercial media organization with a reasonable separation between news/opinion and advertising.

I don’t think that distinction explains it entirely.

As I said before, I think you need other rules/mechanisms to deal with subtler cases.

For example, if there had been an advertising deal with 454 Life Sciences with some of their scientists brought in to blog about next gen sequencing, do you think there would have been as much backlash from other Sciencebloggers?

Perhaps there wouldn’t have been, because people would perceive them as less dangerously biased, but I would hope that there’d be some objections, and I do think that the general rule should apply in such a case.

If people who sell sequencers are blogging about sequencing, that’s a conflict of interest—especially if they have competitors who are not given a similar pulpit. There’s a clear risk that their blogging will be biased toward selling their brand of sequencers. (E.g., downplaying drawbacks of their approach and advantages of competitors.’)

That’s another case where I don’t think that it would be appropriate to have a for-profit-corporate blog. That’s not what I expect, or would hope I could expect, from Sb.

In such a case, I think it would be more appropriate to have those corporate sequencing folks guest blog on somebody else’s blog, and to let their competitors do so too if a controversy comes up.

There are other cases that might be problematic for a simple rule, especially since it’s not clear how to determine whether someone is “paid to blog.” For example, I don’t know if Mark Chu-Carroll is paid to blog, implicitly, by Google. I’m not much worried about him, because he doesn’t seem to grind particularly Googlian axes, and I don’t see Google as particularly likely to corrupt his message to favor Google’s products, or for such corruption to be major or worthwhile given the audience at Sb. Those are admittedly judgment calls, though, so maybe Mark makes a better example for making my simple rule look bad.

Or if the Templeton Foundation sponsored a blog here, would that have been OK since it’s a nonprofit?

No, that would be covered by a different rule.

Actually, an example closer to home would be the National Center for Science Education, and Josh Rosenau’s “Thoughts from Kansas” blog.

It has often appeared to me that Josh being an employee of NCSI is a conflict of interest, and that it’s plausible that it biases what he writes. (In a way that particularly bugs me.)

It seems to me that Josh pushes the standard compatibilist accommodationist party line, maybe more than he really believes it, in support of NCSI’s strategy. He’s just not going to admit that Genie Scott is wrong about science/religion compatibility, no matter what he actually thinks, because that would undermine NCSI’s political strategy and public stance. He’s a paid political operative, and I do think that creates a conflict of interest situation.

On the other hand, it does matter that NCSI is a nonprofit educational organization, whose basic mission is pro-science. I think that tips the balance against disqualifying him. (If NCSI was a for-profit corporation selling accommodationist textbooks, I’d say throw him out. The conflict of interest would be too clear, and too clearly financial rather than ideological.)

So in that case, I think it’s okay to fall back on the usual informal mechanisms—when Josh seems to be pushing the NCSI party line, and other bloggers and commenters think he’s being patently bogus, we call him on it.

The Templeton foundation wouldn’t be disqualified on the grounds of profit motive. They’d be disqualified on the grounds that they’re basically anti-scientific, ideologically. Their main mission is one that many scientists think—rightly, IMHO—is to obscure the scientific truth about what they’re talking about.

Compared to NCSI, Templeton would bring less good stuff to the table—they don’t care much about anything besides wrapping religion in apparent scientific acceptability—and would bring more bad stuff. That would put an undue burden on other bloggers and commenters countering their continuous bogosity.

It’s understandable that many bloggers felt embarrassed and betrayed about the Pepsi decision, but there seems to be some rationalization going on when they attribute this entirely/mostly to Pepsi being a corporation.

I sort of agree. The problem is not just that Pepsi is a corporation, but that it’s a for-profit corporation whose profit motive (selling more soda, fast food, etc.) very plausibly conflicts directy with the mission of telling the truth about what they’re supposed to be blogging about (nutrition).

I think the people objecting are right to object—serious conflicts of interest should be avoided, when it’s easy, and if that’s not a serious, easily-avoided conflict of interest, what would be?

The people disagreeing with them are right, up to a point, in pointing out that there are gray areas and existing cases of arguable conflict of interest that have been accepted. (I just gave two.)

The bottom line for me is that those people seem to be making a slippery slope argument—we’ve accepted some conflicts of interest already, and there are evidently no rules, so we should just give up accept them all, no matter how large or how clear.

I think that’s wrong. Some cases are close to black and white, and this is one of them.

The Pepsi scientists may have good and interesting stuff to say, and in fact stuff I personally want to hear about. (I don’t know what I think about HFCS or artificial sweeteners, for example, and I do care.) Given the clear financial conflict of interest, I just don’t want them to be able to control the dialogue by having their own blog, the ability to moderate comments, etc.

I’m not sure which is worse, the un-fixed bold tag or the fact that you apparently would have us believe you SERIOUSLY don’t see a difference between posting supportive statements about something on your own initiative because you genuinely like it, and posting supportive statements about something because it’s your job to do so (you’re paid to/you get fired if you refuse) regardless of your opinion. :/

1. There are no ‘unfixed bold tags’. There are two phrases in bold in this post, and they are meant to be. Maybe its your browser.

Well, with IE8, I see it. Don’t see it with firefox. Starts in your OP, and carries all the way down through every comment. (The whole OP is quoted in EI after the first paragraph). I wonder if I can fix it by putting an end bold tag in front of this sentence.

“Because we’re constantly taught that corporations are evil and that if you’re a scientist and not a tenure track professor you’re a failure at life :p”

*golf clap*

And who teaches us this shit?

Assistant associate adjunct slobs with neither the ambition nor the brains to cut it in the private sector so they tell themselves and their students blatant lies about the purity and nobility of academia.

When I was in academia it was a giant gossipy retarded kindergarten class screaming and pooping itself over who got the biggest cookie and who deserved to get their damn juice box first.

It made me want to puke. There was nothing ethical about it and far more time was burned by douche bags lying about their qualifications and pumping the crap out of their weak C Vs(and graduate students) than was ever spent doing the research, writing or teaching.

Take a good look at the wastes of air that stamped their feet the hardest in this flap.

Journalists: free lance or otherwise, they are dumb whores. They can’t do anything so they write about other people doing things…badly.

Journalistic ethics are a joke. All they really give a shit about is circulation (money) and not getting sued cross eyed (money). They don’t have any regard for what is true or a lie. They care how the reader feels about THEM. They are, by definition, bullshit artists.

What’s ethical about handing out a third rate education because the kids don’t know you aren’t qualified and the administration doesn’t care? Nothing. You do it because you’re a pretentious clod who thinks managing a Starbucks is to menial for someone with a doctoral degree although it would be 12 grand more per year and the health insurance is better.

Cat ladies:32 friggin years in school piling up post graduate ephemera for a decade to avoid the mountain of student loans around the corner, an hour and a half in the private sector when a magic invisible disability and a second husband appears to subsidize seven years of politically deconstructing television commercials….on the blog….from the couch.

In retrospect this nonsense will be regarded as the time PepsiCo dropped by scienceblogs and lanced a lot of boils on it’s neck.